The Daily Stoic - Author Nancy Sherman on Building Resilience and Living Well | What Are You Making Up About This? That’s The Question.

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to author Nancy Sherman about her new book Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience, using Stoicism to work through emotional trauma rather than repress it, her experience teaching Stoic philosophy to the armed forces, and more. Nancy Sherman is a New York Times Notable Author. She has written several books on Stoicism including Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind. She has also written over 60 articles in the area of ethics, military ethics, the history of moral philosophy, ancient ethics, the emotions, moral psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is the Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. You get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too.Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.Policygenius helps you compare top insurers in one place, and it lets you save 50% or more on life insurance. Policygenius will help you find the insurance coverage you need. You can save 50% or more by comparing quotes. Just go to policygenius.com to get started. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic Follow Nancy Sherman: Twitter: https://twitter.com/drnancysherman Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Nancy-Sherman-190609228735/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. What are you making up about this? That's the question. If you've ever been to therapy,

you've probably been nicely brought around to this idea that there is whatever your husband or wife or father or mother or sister or brother or boss is saying to you and then there's what you're hearing. In fact, in a lot of couples counseling, the therapist will try to get couples to stop fights from spiraling by asking them to say to each other, okay, what I am hearing when you say that is, or what I make up about this is, because it's true. Your mother thought she was just teasing, but what you heard when she did that was, I don't love you, and you're not good enough. You feel like you're just sighing because you're tired, but what your husband is hearing is,

I'm upset with you and now he's getting ready to defend himself. That expression, what I make up about this is, is really illustrative and at its core an idea that touches on the teachings of epictetus. See what other people do or say is objective. Usually it's pretty straightforward or harmless. In fact, with the people we love most of the time,

it's meant well. That's why we love them in the first place. But for some reason, we make up stories about it. We add interpretations or project intentions that are totally about us, and then we wonder why it descends into a fight or hurt feelings. It's not things that upset us, Epictetus said, it's our judgment about things.

It's what we make up about things that upset us. It's what we hear, not what people say, that is the problem. So whatever you think about today, think about that. Whenever you feel triggered or misunderstood or attacked, is that actually what's happening or you're just making it up? Is it likely that they were saying anything close to what you heard or is your hearing precisely the source of the conflict? Because it usually is. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic podcast.

I can't tell exactly when I first heard of today's guest, but let me just say she is very highly recommended and very highly regarded, particularly in military circle. So I'm almost positive it was that someone recommended her first book to me, Stoic Warriors, which is about the sort of culture of Stoicism, the prose as well as the cons, and the sort of ethical ramifications of, you know, the sort of the wisdom of Mark's Relice in Seneca and Epictetus, inside the military culture. And I think there is no culture that sort of lionizes those four virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom more than military culture. And also,

you know, some of the ethical quandaries and stressors against those virtues. So, her writing is fascinating. What she's really doing is applying the philosophy, the way it's supposed to be applied, which is to those vexing really difficult problems of life. I'm talking about the one and only Nancy Sherman. She is a distinguished university professor and professor of philosophy at Georgetown, and previously she was the distinguished chair in ethics at the United States Naval Academy. So obviously the connection between Stoicism and the Naval Academy goes back to Stockdale. I've been honored myself to speak at the Stockdale Center and the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. Nancy's work has taken her to visit Guantanamo Bay to visit the conditions the detainees were under to

provide some ethical advice as their treatment. She was an observer to the vice chief of the Army's Suicide Review Board in 2011 and she's written books like After War Healing, The Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers, The Untold War, Inside the Hearts, Mines, and Souls of Our Soldiers. And then as I was telling you, Stoic warriors, the ancient philosophy behind the military mind, as well as making a necessity of virtue, Aristotle and Kanton virtue, and the fabric of character, Aristotle's theory of virtue. But it's her newest book that we're talking about. This is Stoic Wisdom, ancient lessons for modern resilience, which I was quite honored to blurb. I'll give you my blurb here. My policy is basically I do not blurb books. I just don't have the time. It's a thing

where you do it for one. You have to do it for a million people. So there's very rarely do I make exceptions, but Nancy's work had been influential to me. We have some mutual friends. So when she reached out, made an exception, and you can see why. I said, Professor Sherman applies stoicism to where it is most needed for our warriors and working people alike,

and it helps them become better and more resilient. So this was a great conversation. We go into all sorts of, look, we nerd out about stoicism. As you know, sometimes on the podcast, I have sort of famous people, I have athletes, and we talk about their work, but what really gets me excited

is when I can go way in depth into the philosophy, get some of my own questions answered. So that was what today's conversation was an opportunity to do. So I think you're really gonna like this interview. I also wanted to say, I hope everyone's doing well. I hope you're getting your vaccines. If they're available in your area, I hope you've continued to be smart and safe. I was thinking about this the other day. Just it's

unbelievable to me that, you know, what is transpired in the last year. I mean, we were just kind of getting this podcast going in March of 2020. We've done maybe two in-person ones. We've done that where I read the daily emails that have been going for a while. And we're just kind of experimenting with maybe we'd have more guests. I wasn't sure if I was going to do it or not.

And then with the pandemic, when suddenly I couldn't travel and doing the remote stuff was easier, I ended up just starting to interview some people and it's crazy to me to see that a year later, just all the wonderful conversations I've got to have. I feel like I hope I've gotten better as an interviewer, but I've learned a lot. I've been exposed to some great stuff. I know it's been downloaded millions and millions of times Which is really cool when I talk about how the obstacle can be the way. I don't want you to think that this isn't something I

I Don't apply in my own life. I mean, of course I do this this thing happened it changed and disrupted my life my career How I was interacting with people and doing my job. And as frustrating as it was, you see sort of that one avenue close, this other one opened up in a big way. And I've really enjoyed doing it. I'm grateful that you're listening. And of course, I was really excited

to have this conversation with Professor Sherman and tell you about her new book, Stoke Wisdom, Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience. You can check out Nancy's stuff. And of course, you can follow her on Twitter. She is at Dr. Nancy Sherman. And you can also check out her work at Nancy Sherman.com. I wanted to start with the theme that I think a lot of people have some preconceptions about stoicism with and I think your work is important here. I think it pertains to the military culture I imagine as well, which is this sort of the myth of the sort of the invulnerable

stoic, the person who feels no pain, who shrugs it all off. I'm not sure that's ideal, and I'm not sure that's what the stoics we're talking about either. So talk to be about that kind of stereotype, which I imagine you have butted up against a lot. Absolutely. So when I got to the Naval Academy in the long time ago, now several decades ago, mid-'90s, when I taught ethics, the part of that course that just resonated was being stoic. And for them, it meant little less stoicism,

suck it up and truck on, or in a less elegant phrase, embrace the suck. And the idea was, grit is just invincibility and domineability, and you know they pick up some of that from epictetus, you're in the ring, it's athletic grit, They pick up some of that from epictetus. You're in the ring, it's athletic grit, and keep getting up and fighting on. And that's what missions are about often, carrying the burden with a lot of self-sacrifice. And certainly in the military,

deprivation is the name of the game, especially if you're in a submarine or something like that or aircraft carrier. So I said about thinking, is that really what the Stoics have to say? And in my work over the years, now in the new book, Stoic Wisdom, I really found that that isn't the complete message by any means. The Stoics were aspiring to get to tough it up a bit and to arm themselves against some of life's misfortunes and accidents and things you can't control, but it's not as if they were accepting that all, and they also knew a lot about grief.

They knew a lot about suffering, and they experienced it with the motions that they weren't ready to just get rid of. And Seneca, for me, is the person who speaks to that most loudly. He's the patient as well as the doctor, and he's the doctor of therapy because he suffers those sorts of things that can unmoor you. And I think it's critical, not just in the military, but in general, because the idea of grit that is unflappable and controls everything is just really unhealthy. So looking for that in the Stoics, A, I don't think that's the undivided message by any means.

And B, it's not good for a modern healthy stoicism. Yeah, I think I've got to imagine at the Naval Academy specifically, so much of that sort of indomitable, unbreakableness comes from Stockdale, who obviously has to embody those traits in one of those sort of worst environments that human beings have had to experience. But it also strikes me that when you really even dig into that example, what I think is fascinating is the sort of loving tenderness that's expressed between these fellow prisoners,

whether it's nursing each other back to health, whether it's comforting one of the, there are comrades after breaking under torture. It was sort of superhuman in one sense and then also very human in another sense. Stoctel is amazing in that regard. We think of him as invincible in some ways, but he wasn't. And he is someone who he was ahead of the chain of command. And you know, he they had a, a, a, a morse code kind of tap system on walls and swishing essentially poop buckets where you could hear the sound.

And that was a kind of code. And some of it was, are you okay? Meaning, I'm looking out for you, who you on the other side of the wall. And Stockton, whom I interviewed a few times in his later years, essentially said, I'm not a converter. I gave up on converting.

When I said, are you okay and maybe blurted out something in code about stoicism, I got dead silence. And I realized I had my ducks lined up one way and others had their ducks lined up another way. And that's the kind of graciousness that he embodied about care. He was in it not for himself. This wasn't just self-help therapy. This was group survival.

And he knew that they were gonna break at some point. Each person had their own breaking point. And their job was to support each other. And he also was supported by the home community, civil stock deal, with whom he wrote these long letters in code and ways of disabeling, I'm not sure I understood all of it, is explaining it to me,

but they kept up a correspondence and love sustained him. They ended up writing in love and war. And she was fascinating when I went to interview them. She was in the kitchen and he said something to the effect that Stoicism was the silver lining for him of being a POW for seven and a half years. And she came rushing back in, took a seat at the table.

And she said, I'd get my silver lining in a different way. And that was important. I think she was a religion major at Mount Holyoke, but that said, she was also a very strong force. She helped to get those POWs out of back home in negotiations in DC with McNamara and others. So, I think the care and concern and empathy really played out. And that's a message in Marcus Aurelius.

If you're, you know, think of a battlefield with strewn body parts. The body parts alone are not a whole human being. If you cut yourself off from the community, you've cut yourself off from being at home in the world. Something to that effect. And I think he really embraced that as a stoic message. Well, Marcus also talks about another sort of war metaphor. He talks about how we're soldiers storming a wall.

He says, so you have to ask for someone to pull you up. That's what that's what they're here for. He's sort of seeing this as this sort of community or this regiment of soldiers as opposed to being these individual warriors who are supposed to sort of do everything by yourself and be totally self-sufficient. I think that's a really easy thing to miss in Marcus Aurelius and in Stochtau, you see him as the solitary warrior,

but really it was this sort of band of brothers. They were very much a cadre. I mean, he was in a chain of command because that's what he needed. I mean, and that's what he knew and he was the most senior. So he took the head of the command. But they also were watching out for each other in the most subtle micro movements. I mean, they would listen for footsteps, as I say, they would listen for how the brush swished in the, you swished in the ship bucket.

Excuse me. And that, I mean, anything that they could use to communicate to break the solitude would be important in order to save each other, save their souls. That's what they were doing. They were saving their psyches without compromising the country for which they for which they fought. So yeah, and Marcus also, he thanks all these people in his meditations. At the beginning, though. Yes, and it probably wasn't at the beginning, but that's that's where it appears now. In these meditations to himself, and they're very interesting. Well, you know, thereitations to himself, and they're very interesting, well, you know, there's to your mother

and your great uncle and grandfather and whatnot, but to his Gramarian, who is very generous and not carping. It reminds me of the idea of be a generous listener. Don't correct everything they say and try to understand the intent and not just the exact words. If they get the grammar wrong, I think of that from teaching a lot. And so, yeah, he was very much indebted to this larger community to be at home in the world.

That phrase is so important. And that world was global. It wasn't just a small world. It's the cosmos. We grew out of the palace that was Aristotle's community and now it's an expansionist world, of course, military expansion. But also they had an idea that humanity was cosmopol. It was, that's the word means citizen of the universe, citizen of the cosmos. And that was where you, that's what anyone in that world had good enough reason to be

part of the cosmos and complicated story about the enslaved persons. But yeah, it really was the beginning of the enlightenment, whether it's the rational enlightenment with Kant or the enlightenment with the Scottish enlightenment theorists who believed in sympathy are version of empathy to connect us all as the connective tissue. But I think sometimes of Bob Putnam, the political scientist from Harvard, like bowling alone. Yeah. Social capital was an old word. It's not in use much anymore, but it's a great word. And it's about the tissues of connection for trust and reciprocation.

And I kind of think of the stoic community as like not bowling alone. Well speaking of people in that POW camp, I know John McCain is there as well and not as explicitly a student of stoicism, what I find so incredible about history and again, sort of not as explored is that he had the opportunity to leave. Like if it really was the stoic warrior you're on your own, you're not connected to anyone or anything, I mean, one would imagine he would have gone home when he had the choice to go home, but he stayed.

I mean, that's what's so incredible about the ordeal that he goes through and the disability that he suffers for the rest of his life is how if this was solely about self-preservation, you know, he may have been able to forgo a lot of that, but he stayed. Yeah, he really exhibited the honor of a service member of a sailor here. His father was an admiral and very much in charge. And as a result, he was known and given a chance

to jump the queue, essentially. And they had a clear order, first in, first out, and you wait your turn. Until civil stockdale and other, it was women. The spouses were all women, made it clear that everyone has to get out of the Hanoi Hilton, as it was called, the North Vietnamese prison. And he waited his turn and he was tortured. I mean, it was, you know, it's a horrible fate that he was the last president didn't recognize it.

But this man was tortured deeply. He knew what torture was about, and he was an advocate early on of getting rid of torture in our current military system on Guantanamo and Abogreyb and Malike. He spoke out loud and clear about it because he was a victim of it. So yeah, they were a cadre. And when you, I've studied a lot of, what keeps a cadre together, what keeps a dance company together,

and some of it is mimicry of motions. And you kind of pick that up almost in when you're reading Marcus. He talks about coordination of movements. And you can kind of... Although he does say it's better to be a wrestler than a dancer and dogging for life's sudden attacks. Yes, that's true.

But when he's talking about sort of fields and the coordination that goes in it, you kind of picture, I sometimes picture, the song, World War One, and marching. And they're connecting with each other through feet, mimicry of motions. And, you know, the POWs had little to go on, but a few sounds here and there, and picking those up. And, you know, and that sustained them. So yeah. Well, Mark and Marcus talks about sort of returning to the rhythm and you almost get the sense that he views the the logo says this sort of jet stream or this current that you can drift from, but you're always kind of trying to get back towards. Yes, he there's definitely, well, you know, he's he's

sort of a street philosopher. He's he just picks us up because everyone in that period is reading this. This is street philosophy of the day. And you're educated in it. You have tutors that teach you that. Stoicism was much more popular at the time than Epicurianism or the skepticism. And you know, Aristotle hadn't yet made it. His era was still in the marketplace a bit. It hadn't really made it into the full street

in the way that Stoicism became more of a public philosophy. And he's sort of also picking up Heraclitus, you know, the flux and the flow and the coming and going, the ab of the tide. And you hear that a lot in his philosophy. Well, I want to go back to this idea of the invulnerable stoic for a second, because it ties in with, I think something

you've tried to talk about in your work, particularly in stoic warriors and some of your op-eds. But I also think is the sort of the thread through like someone like Brunei Brown's work, which is the idea that it actually, courage is not just risking oneself on the battlefield, it's not just the endurance of pain, it's not just fortitude in that sense, but it's also, you know, the courage to be vulnerable, to ask for help, to put oneself out there, to let oneself be cared for by someone or something else.

I think we sometimes have a kind of a singular definition of courage, when I think actually sometimes the bravest thing is, you know, the admission of pain or guilt and the desire to do something about it? I think that's really crucial, Ryan, because I think, well, the military community, but other communities as well, sexual assault survivor, folks who are suffering from addictions, or other kinds of issues where they really need management from outside and not self-medication.

And asking for help is really, really important. And I'll just give them something that really plagues the military. And that is the idea of go it alone, grit, or just being tough enough to endure because you have a mission to accomplish and you have to be an operational tempo or opt tempo is it's called. And that really conflicts with something we long knew and then a new form of it. So post-traumatic stress, 1980s, the diagnosis comes in as a way of talking about a real debilitating condition that comes from fear, fear of overwhelming threat that you would suffer,

for example, on a battlefield, but also as a victim of sexual assault or in other kinds of cases of, many people feel some of that right now in the pandemic, where everything is just too much and it comes in and you get over vigilant and you dissociate a bit and clamp down. And in the, in addition, there is something we now know as moral injury, which is not so much a fear conditioned response, but rather a response to moral threat, moral compromise, whether you think you've done something real or apparent, you suffer something as a victim or you're an up close observer, wartime reporter, wartime

photographer, civilian looking on. All of that kind of unhinge you morally in milder severe ways. And you feel guilt, you feel resentment, and you feel horrible shame. And the path is not go it alone. The path is to seek help, whether it's first your family members or those who are more professional counselors. And so the military really has fought hard in trying to figure out how to get people to see counseling when they need it. And so some of it comes through primary care.

You know, how when you see a primary care doc, you also can talk about other things. Some of it's through group work. Some of it's through other things, some of it's through group work, some of it's through journaling, some of it's through, I don't know, it could be the national endowment for the humanities having war dialogues and bringing people together that way, or me talking to my students in class, frankly, many of whom are returning veterans who have seen and done and been and suffered horrible things by being a sniper, surviving when their buddies don't be in collateral incidents where they rules of engagement allow them to shoot, but yet someone was in a car that was going to a hospital or a young kid gets killed. And in some cases, their parents themselves,

they see the kid as their own kid. And it's horribly frightening. And just talking is a way to share the civilian burden share burden with civilians, but also getting people to help in ways that allow them to find some self-compassion. And I think the Stoics are really good on this. No, you know, many don't turn to the Stoics for this, but if you read Seneca and you read

Seneca's tragedies, one of them is Hercules Rages. And in Hercules Rages, Hercules does something horrific because he's been blinded by a vengeful stepmother, Juno, who can't stand the fact that Hercules is the child of another wife of Jupiter. And Hercules comes out of the underworld 12 labors later and he kills his wife and kid. and he kills his wife and kid, kids, and he's ready to kill himself. The rage and suicidal feelings are so strong, and this resonates with many military folks. How can I possibly have done this? Bad intelligence, of course, rules of engagement that were two two lacks, fog of war, all of that.

And it's a just as you say it's a it's a father and a friend that says use your heroic courage to to to to show yourself some self mercy. And I think that's a really, really important lesson. Use your heroic courage to try to stay your anger and to find some self-mercy. And sometimes it requires, would you hold everyone else's responsible for some of the horrible accidents of war or of life that you yourself hold yourself responsible for, not clear if you switch perspectives.

So it's sort of more fairly, the feelings are very apt, but they're also very unfair and so punitive. Yeah, I had Brian Dorey's on podcast a few months ago. And I think if you see Senaqa's plays as sort of a catharsis or an outlet for what must have been horrendously stressful and then also said, you said sort of morally injurious and then also you said sort of morally injurious time in a corrupt broken administration. It makes sense. And yeah, you talked about this earlier, but it's hard not to see Seneca as sort of the

most thoughtful and the artistic of the Stoics. You know, he's not, he's not Epictetus who's born in the slavery. He's not Marcus Aurelius, kind of this tough guy. I see him as more of this sort of creative, empathetic, artistic guy who probably would have felt a lot of the things that he sort of glosses over in his writings quite deeply. Yes, he's a complicated figure, and I think for that reason, well worth the read. He's Claudius puts him in Corsica, then it wasn't the gorgeous island it is now where we've spent some time as my daughters to teach there.

It was a horrible place to spend seven or eight years, a desolate wasteland. And he's brought back by Claudius's wife, Agrippina, who becomes Nero's mother and or is Nero's mother. And she wants the best person of letters and oratory and rhetoric to teach her son because she has ambitions for him. Yeah, I'll become the first leader, the emperor. And so, Sennaka is in the court, and his hands are dirty a lot of the time, to be frank. You know, he swims in very muddy streams and muddy rivers. But as a result, he kind of knows power politics, and he also knows aspiration.

And he grew up very sickly. He was a very good student, trained in stoicism. So he's always on the cusp of living opulently but wanting a simpler life. And he lives in his later years, he's forced to exile himself a retire from political life. And he keeps up a correspondence with a young, it's an art form, as you say, but it's with a young, a nucleus, and it's an epistolary relationship.

It's wonderful. He's writing to himself, but he's writing to someone else. Any imagine the person getting the letters and coming home and opening a letter and can't wait to reply. It's an art form, but it's about mentoring and it's about reach out to me. I'm here and it's also about we struggle.

So capturing the struggle, I think, is what the Stoics do best. They're kind of aspirational group of philosophers. And I think that's why they're so appealing. They are always struggling with your demons in a certain way. Yeah, one of the things I've talked about when I've done different events for military groups

and things like that is the sort of the metaphor I use is a credit card. You know, so you have this pain, you have this vulnerability, you have this thing you're struggling with and you don't wanna deal with it. And you tell yourself, I'm not dealing with it, I'm just stuffing it down. That doesn't like go away. I sort of liken it to being, you're just putting it on this credit card with

an extremely high interest rate. And it's just accumulating and compounding. And the bill inevitably comes due, right? And it becomes something that you can afford to pay even less in the future because it's so much higher. And I think we sometimes, again, think of the Stoics as saying, don't deal with this stuff it down. I actually think it's the opposite when the Stoics are mastering their emotions. It's not that they don't have the emotions. To me, it's that they nip it in the bud in the sense of, this is happening, this is real,

this is the emotion that I'm having. Let's process this right now. Let's deal with it right now, as opposed to putting it off or pretending that it doesn't exist. Yeah, they are really brilliant, I think, when it comes first to describing the emotions. They're a little off at times with the prescribing, how you manage and deal with it.

But the describing is just as you say, there's nip in the bud phenomenon. You get this, sometimes with some emotions, they just come upon you. You know, they're first flushes and blushes. And some of them are like blushes. You can't turn it off easily, but you can see that you're getting red. So you can't. So what's the word for that?

It's like phantasy or something. Yeah, fontasia, which is an impression, exactly. And that's the Greek firm, impression. And it's an appearance. And so you get this kind of, you get input, you get sensory input. And it comes in and the Stoics have a great way of talking about it.

It's kind of a rectic, meaning it's grabby. It holds you for a while. It's charged. It's impulsive. Or it's her medicaid, like a hormone. It charges. It's got this hormone feature to it. And it does catch you by surprise,

but the Stoics brilliance, as they say, for some of them, not all. I mean, if a bear is in front of you, you're very happy to have that trigger response and run, get the hell out of there. But for others, you might want a little more calm. So you can nip it in the bud, you can put some space in between it

and there were does not ascent to the impression. At some point, to use connamens language, it's really, really useful to think fast. Thinking fast is a very, very good thing, but sometimes you have to monitor your thinking fast with thinking slowly. And so they give you a moment, the Stoics give you a moment to think slowly. They sort of, they say, do you want to hold on to that anger, for example? And so that's what all this meditation is about to think about, did you throw your servants

into the sharp pool yesterday? Because they broke a crystal goblet. Were you sharp at someone when they wouldn't let you into the mansion or something of that sort? And that's the moment of pause. It's, I've talked to young, young stoic acolytes who are in classrooms that use this a little bit like, you know, thinking about deferred gratification with students.

Look at that stuff out there. You know, you have a lot of big bowl of candy. You want it right now. What would happen if you waited a little more? You might get more. This is sort of the Walter Mieschelle experiment about the marshmallows, but on deferred gratification. But they don't know anything.

These people I've talked to don't know it. They're just reading straight out of the stoics, thinking I can teach my young 5, 6, 7, 8 year olds how to put a stop, a pause button, or push a pause button between, I want those sneakers, I have to have those sneakers, and I'm gonna get them right now. Right.

And thinking, is that the best way to go? So yeah, I think that, you know, they're very good about that, and then they have this further notion that after you have that, there's a way of managing more full-blown emotions, thinking about a little bit about how would you react? OK, so now you're feeling angry. Should you yell?

Should you scream? Should you count to 10? Should you write a bit in your diary? How do you, what's the behavioral response to the cognition you're experiencing? So they're a little bit, you know, they are cognitive behavioral therapists of an early sort. You have an emotion that has a certain kind of appearance out there, impression out there, and then a second kind of moment of volition is, how should I respond to that? What should I do? And I think that's really a useful way of thinking about emotions.

I think they're pretty brilliant on emotions. As I say, what we now think are emotions that have big cognitive components and a lot more that we can manage, I think they're a little tougher, not harder to buy full wholesale on grief, but. Well, I think we have to add to the Stoics, our understanding of psychology and biology and just sort of what's going on beneath the surface. My wife was an addiction counselor

early in our relationship and shoot always sort of tell me someone would come in, you know, they're in this rehab center. I'm just really having a hard time right now. And I seem to always have a hard time at Christmas, let's say. And you'd sort of probe through it and it'd be like, well, that's because your father died at Christmas or you went through this traumatic event at Christmas and we can become sort of so dissociated but we have this sort of trauma embedded inside us that we don't understand that the reason we're having this impression it's actually as much less to do

with the external stimuli and more to do with how we're seeing it internally because of our experiences. I deal with, this is why I go to therapy, is I have some issues from my childhood and I find that those experiences then affect how I react to something that an ordinary person might find not to be much of a trigger or much of a painful experience.

To me, hits me in kind of a soft place. And so I feel like maybe we're the stills. I don't want to say we're insufficient, but we're just, you know, only on the cusp of what we now have a better understanding of is that you really have to sort of deal with these things from your past, from your biology, from your psychology, because, you know, when Epic Titus says, you know, it's not things that upset us, it's our judgment about things. It's not just what our judgment is looking at in front of us and how we're being misled by this or that. It's almost how we're misleading ourselves

because of what we're carrying around. Well, right. So these impressions don't just have to come, if we give an update to them, as you say, and be moderns about it, the impressions or the stimulus, all the sensory input that's coming in, isn't just coming in from outside, it's coming in from reawoken memories, to call them triggers, whatever you like.

And those memories can, as you say, come on the button, on a birth date, a memorial date of some sort. Or they can just sort of seep in through the cracks because some unexplained thing in a dream or what your kid did, or when you pick up a glass and you rub your fingers over the crystal or something

like that, all of a sudden it brings back your father and the shot glass he used and had a splash in. And there you are, the five yearyear-old back in that dining room and some other connected, you know, prustian-like experience gets triggered and all of a sudden you're in the grip of that. Yeah, so I think the Stoics are definitely giving you space between whatever the prod is or stimulus

is of an impression from outside inside memory, encrusted memory, and the ways in which you can then have a response to it. It's a very, very complicated process. We now know more. I mean, you could throw in Freud as well. You're talking about stuff that bubbles up and comes from, you know, your childhood or currently now, from traumatic experiences that you experience out on the streets, due to a storm, Katrina, a pandemic, loss. We're, you know, in the grip of a lot of hurt right now.

And I think some of the issues to do with, will I be able to touch someone? What I'm dealing with is, even fully vaccine, how safe do I have to be in order to be out there in the classroom teaching my students? What will this look like? All of that made trigger stuff that is not that pleasant,

you know, about close calls, risks we took where it wasn't quite there. I just want to say something about the anniversary memories. I had an uncle that served in Okinawa and a marine. And to the date, 50 years after an event, he would found himself in a park and he turned a bowed on his heels. There were young kids on bikes and he said, get out of my way, I'm going to shoot you. He was reenacting something from a bayonet fight. You know, and they were fighting 48 hours nonstop on the ridge. on the ridge and it was very gruesome battle and some of them were kept awake for long periods of time, probably on speed back then. And he had this on the moment on the date. I don't know how the biochemistry works of our brains, but it stores down these memories deep.

And in his case, he re-adacted it in a very inhospitable way. You know, I think the kids probably were frightened out of their minds. Of course. Seeing this guy in a perk, treat them as combat enemies in Japan, you know, in Okinawa. Well, let's talk about grief for a second, because when I was writing Lives of the Stoics,

I think what's interesting is, you know, you can read Marcus Aurelius a bunch of times. You can read Santa Cunepetitis. And if you're just sort of interacting with them as philosophers, there's a lot of value, so much you can get. And it's probably enough to fill a lifetime. But it was really writing that book, and then again, over the last year, that I sort of had a couple breakthroughs with Marx's

realist that writing lives it was watching death run itself through Marx's life, right? He loses his father. He loses I think like six children, like he had a lot of children, but like six of them die at an early age. It was sort of watching just how profound loss was as a theme in his life. And then when I, you know, it really doesn't hit me until March of last year, that Marcus is writing during the Antenine plague, which is, you know, like COVID-19 times a thousand at last for 15 years, like 10 or 15 million people die. It's it's it's heinous,

but but realizing that, you know, one market when Marcus talks about grief and the Stokes talk about loss, this was something they were intimately familiar with at just like a almost unfathomable level, but then it also does strike me that it probably was so prevalent and profound that they're not really fully able to grapple with it and maybe they do sort of shut down and disassociate from it a little. I mean, he never mentions, for instance, in meditations, where he's trying to, you know, he mentions, losing his temper like 50 times. He never mentions like the pain of burying a child,

which no parent should ever have to do, let alone a half dozen times. Sennaka himself buries a child young, from what we gather. I mean, these would have been profoundly painful experience. Well, grief is a complicated emotion for the Romans. I think in some ways, the Greek plays are better on this than the Roman plays. I mean, think of Homer, you know, Achilles cries. He cries in pre-oms breast at the death of all of pre-emprimes' sons in Troy. And that is an important lesson. The Romans have a whole series of decorum. They wear roles.

You know, Cicero writes a lot about persona. It's the persona, the roles you play. And one of them is how you conduct yourself in grief. So there's a, though, their customs are not ours. So I don't think we should confuse what a Roman would do and how a Roman would grieve at the loss of children. And children's deaths are much more common than mortality rates or not what they are today. So that, and also they hire keynoters to women to grieve for them and to cry. So it's just as any tradition and custom

has its own morning practices, so too the Romans really have their own morning practices. And Seneca sort of struggles with that. I think he's an interesting person to turn to. You know, he thinks that, and I mentioned this in the new book, Stoic Wisdom, you know, he thinks that there are certain, we talked about involuntary responses, these proto-emotions or pre-emotions that creep up on you. You might have to nip in the bud. Well, tears can be like that. And if they're involuntary,

they just sort of come, then, okay, they're okay. You can shed them involuntarily. But if you indulge them, like put on a show, we might say crocodile tears, but a little bit of a performance. Emotions are very expressive, and we control their expression often. And that's why they're so brilliant, the Stoics. They know that you can both have involuntary expressions of emotions and highly staged performances of them. To feel an emotion is not to show it necessarily or express it. There are two different moments of the emotion.

And so they're sort of saying, you can feel some of these things, but how you show it when you express it and how much you express it to what degree, that's a part of the voluntary moment. And that's the reaction that you can kind of control. And so in that regard, they know they're in this environment of being staged. If you think of Cicero, Cicero loses his beloved daughter,

Tulia, in childbirth. He goes outside Rome to the Tuskeling Hills. And he writes this thing called Tuskeling Disputations. The Tuskeling Disputations and his many letters to a friend, Atticus, are about... Cicero is in a Stoic, but he turns to them often. And he's how we get along. He's a fellow traveler, I say. He's a fellow traveler. And he is the person who, to whom we're most indebted in many ways for the early Greek stoics. He is the translator of many of them, an expositor and expounder. So he goes there and he sort of uses them as self-help therapy, you know what? Because he he's he wants to get back to the forum and and Caesar's looking

out, well why aren't you here? And he takes about a seven month sabbatical or so because he can't contain himself. So he really knows about tears and he knows about distress and he can't quite pull himself together but he turns to the Stoics to get help. And he sometimes says to the ancient Greek Stoics because he predates Seneca and others. He says, if you think distress isn't real, I think you're wrong. He says, and in some cases distress is not just about loss of your daughter. It's about shame, you know, the distress of losing your character, losing your integrity, selling yourself.

Alcibiades comes up all the time as the sort of the boy who felt shame before Socrates. And he says, that's, that's actually an okay kind of distress and tears because you want to do better in the world. So some, so they're, you know, they have a very next story about distress, grief, you should kind of get over. Maybe we think that too, you know, set how many years, you know, certain periods of time for grief.

But the distress that comes with moral turpitude, not so, not so good. And also I think they're really brilliant on, um, feeling emotion and showing emotion. Why think two of the most emotional and beautiful things that Sennaka writes are his consolations, one to his mother and one to basically the daughter of a friend, which whenever people I know lose someone and they, they go, what did the Stoic say about death or loss?

Those are always the two I point them to. To Marsha, yeah. Yeah, the other one I point them to, which is, you know, again, not quite a stoic, but sort of a fellow traveler and we're indebted to him for some of his wisdom from the stoics. And actually his grandson goes on to be Marx-Realist, his philosophy teacher, but Plutarch, right? So incredibly moving letter to his wife after they lose a young child. And so it was this beautiful literary genre filled with all sorts of wisdom where someone would lose someone, they'd be in incredible pain and they would sit down and try to comfort

them through words. And there's a reason these essays have survived throughout the centuries because they're really, really good. Yeah, the consolations are fascinating and it is an art form. You know, they also talked about consolations about destruction, you know, like the death of the city. Fires, think of the fires in California, think of the floods and, and, you know, what Texas was going through recently. Those consolations about the destruction of... Half a million people have died over the last year.

Absolutely. So, yeah. It's the grief that we will feel and can... I don't think we've processed grief adequately. I don't, you know, we've just begun to have public rituals of grief. And I think the grief is not just for half a million more than America's wars. It's hard for me to believe I used to hold in my head regularly, given my age 50,000 Vietnam soldiers. That was just in, you know, it was on my lens wall here in DC

in the memorial and it was a figure I couldn't really understand. And our current wars have been, we've suffered terribly with traumatic brain and limb loss, but the people have survived because of the state of the art of medicine being so good. But this is a battle we've all been in. I've never been a combatant. I write about war, but I have never been a combatant. I've been privileged to serve with those who have,

at high levels, but I've never been a combatant. And this is a war we're all in, but we don't really know. And I fear some, you know, there will be grief for a long time. I have friends that work on long COVID here at National Institutes of Health NIH. And long COVID is here for a while. We don't quite know, but by that, I mean, the long-term

effects even a very, very mild COVID. Brain fog doesn't just, doesn't begin. It's failures of your autonomic system to regulate your heart, breathing just goes off. And some of it has been detected because doctors report they're suffering it, you know, and so the symptoms are taken very seriously by fellow doctors. But we don't even know how to collect that data. So the grieving, it just will go on. I feel it in my classroom so powerfully. I see 30 tiles right in front of me from Hawaii to New Jersey. And there are my students in their bedrooms, they're, their bedrooms, their crap is falling out of their closet. They're shutting the doors so everyone doesn't see.

Some people have four poster beds. Some people can't connect because we have such a digital divide and I only hear them. And I know there's loss. I don't need, and it's very hard in a public place like a classroom to talk about the loss. And that't need, and it's very hard in a public place, like a classroom, to talk about the loss. And that's what I'm going to do on Monday.

Well, no, I'd true. I'd true. I'd true. Drew Giltman foused a several years ago wrote a book called A Republic of Suffering about. Sure. Yes, Civil War. Yeah.

And, you know, people know a lot of people died in the Civil War. But then when you really, I think think the stat was something like 20% of the male population or under a certain age, it was like obscenely prevalent, and more importantly, like everyone knew somebody or it was connected to somebody who'd lost somebody. And I think that's sort of where we are with the pandemic, and that's what's gonna make, as you said,

the sort of the grief and the societal effects go on. I think also though, this is sort of a tragic statement about sort of the inequality that has become so prevalent in, you know, so the modern American system, which is that some people know lots and lots of people who have been affected. And then there's a whole section of our society that if you ask if they've been affected, they don't, they not only, not know anyone, they've not even heard of anyone in their sort

of extended network that's been affected. And so there's this kind of world where some people are living through this immense tragedy and profound loss and other people sort of have continued to exist in their bubble. And so, you know, that that grief, that grief is not spread equally. And I think to me this this bumps into another Keystonek virtue to me as equally as important as courage, which is this sort of idea of justice. And no man is an island. We're all connected with each other.

I think it's been interesting as I've written about stoicism and I've written about this or justice theme. You can kind of get people on board with courage. You can get people on board with fortitude. You can get people on board with the, you can get people on board with fortitude, you can get people on board with the resiliency side of Stoicism. And then kind of as soon as you express to them, like, no, no, no, no, you have obligations to other people, like what was great about the Spartans was they were in this for the person next to them. I think that part of Stoicism is sort of been lost in translation, particularly as the philosophies become popular again with younger people.

I've been dismayed as I've watched sort of the comments from some people about. Well, I think there's a few things here. One is self-help is part of the me culture. So it's my, it's me, even if the sources were about virtue, where virtue is not just courage or resilience or strength. And secondly, just on the subject of grief, yes, there's the bubble that those who work remotely and in tech worlds, et cetera, can have suffered less because their livelihood is not dependent on being out in the world and exposed. But in addition, there's also the idea that the inequity,

it's not so much inequity, but I would just call it old-fashioned willful ignorance. The vaccines are effective. They are incredibly effective right now. And today the New York Times came out with even more regarding Moderna and Pfizer, because they've been able to study it and the effect in the current environment with the new variants.

But there's ways in which that message has become polarized or it's become part of the new culture wars or the like. And that's really dangerous. And the Stoics were really good, I think, about updating your information quickly. One of the ways in which you rehearse the bads in some ways or prepare is, you know, they have a sage in mind who is omniscient and infallible, so we don't have to go there necessarily, but they were thinking about that in terms of getting the most up-to-date information so you can adjust your expectations and plans

and dwell in the future, their phrase, so that you can be prepared. The idea of being prepared, being one step ahead, pre-rehearsing, anticipating, these are all stoic notions that have to do with trying to stay ahead of the game. That requires information, not disinformation. And it requires embracing truth. And I'm a philosopher, I teach in university, I have little interest in politics about this matter, but I do have interest in the truth

and critical discussion. And I think if you're gonna turn to stoicism, you're gonna turn to individuals and philosophers who are trying their heart, hardest, I think, to think about what evidence you have for ascending to impressions, for example. And that's really critical now. So there's a divide about loss, but there's also a divide about where you choose to get your information and somehow disputing science. And that's grievous.

There's a subject for grief. It's very grievous. I think about, we sort of have two, talk about the Stokesic's not being emotional. We have two recorded instances of Marcus Aurelius crying in public. The first is which is when as a young man, he loses his favorite philosophy teacher. And he's crying and Antoninus Pius sees that someone's trying to sort of say, hey, this isn't Stoic.

And he says, no, let the boy be human for once, right? Let him grieve. And so I think that's an illustrative moment. But the second that we know about from Marcus Aurelius is that during a court case, someone mentions all of those who had died during the plague. And since we know Marcus dies of the plague or suspect he does, this must have been in the middle

of it in some ways. So it's still ongoing, but Mark is supposedly breaks down when he thinks about all the people that have been lost. And so I think, again, if you're taking stoicism as a formula or a recipe for being a better sociopath, you're missing the point. It's actually, it's not supposed to close you up. It's supposed to open you up in some ways, connect you to other people. And I think the sort of circle back where

we're talking about Stockdale, you know, Stockdale says, what's the flip side of what's in it for me? He says, it's this, I am my brother's keeper. Like you, you, you have to care about other people. That is what the philosophy is about. Yeah, the military and especially stock deal, a contemporary stoicism, unless they were really thinking about caring for each other. That just is, you know, if you're, if you're if you go to the academy, you learn real fast ship before ship me, that just is how it goes. And, and even to the academy, you learn real fast ship before shipmate, that just is how it goes. And even before the ship is, you know, on top of that is, obeying an order from a commander

of chief, but atop the commander of chief is always the US Constitution. Am I obeying the US Constitution? And if not, I try to disobey. So I think something that we sometimes forget, there's a lesser known Stoic and Greek Stoic Heracles, H-I-E-R-O-C-L-S, and he has this very, very potent image. And that is you're in the center of concentric circles and you're always bringing the outer circle inward. And it takes an effort, it takes an effort he suggests of imagination. And that's a really important image.

It gets picked up later on, if explicitly or at least implicitly, by Adam Smith, who says, you, in order to really feel connected with others, your heart has to be. You bring it back to your own breast. And that is what empathy is. David Hume puts it in terms of feeling the cord, you're connected with the cord. And those guys were reading the Stoics.

They were reading the Stoics. They were reading the Stoics on social connection. And for them, it was a kind of a motive or emotional feeling for a manual con who was definitely reading the Stoics of German enlightenment philosopher of the 18th century. of the 18th century, yeah. He was thinking of it in terms of reason, which is of course the stoic theme that we all share logos with in a universe, a connected universe. So the connection is critical, and we're at peril if we think stoicism

is the kind of go-it-alone self-therapy for self-enhancment, it was rooted. You can't be a stoic and inherit the ancient tradition without it being rooted in virtue and virtue is other regarding. It's about others and not just about my strength, you know. Totally. Two last things I wanted to talk to you about and then I'll let you go. So the first, I, it's something I've been trying to talk more about and it's against sort of a stereotype I find that stoicism butts up against. It's interesting like when I get interviewed about stuff, people tend to assume that my audience is, is very male, that it must be all guys.

Partly because most of the Stokes historically were guys, but also it just feels perhaps like a masculine philosophy. Actually, it's been interesting when I sort of see who emails me, when I see who's buying the books. It's actually much more evenly distributed than perhaps one might suspect. But I just be curious about your experience as one being a woman who writes about and has studied the stocks for so long, but too, how have you watched like the demographics of your own students change when it comes to stoicism over the years? So I imagine maybe you have seen a chef.

All right. So interesting. So I agree with you. You know, when I'm asked to do podcasts, not yours, but others. Sometimes it is groups that definitely are male-based or in professions that are particularly male-oriented. So, and for whatever reasons, I actually don't like the existing image of Marcus Aurelius alone

on the horse. Oh, interesting. Because I think that that suggests the cowboy on it alone, you know, Mar-Bura man, or something like that. He wasn't a Mar-Bura man, but you know, that exists because I think people thought it was the emperor Constantine. That's how that statue remained and it wasn't brought down. Yeah, you got to imagine that the Christians who ruled Rome, have they known it was Marcus

Arelius, may have not been able to take about it. They've taken it down exactly, exactly, in the way that French Revolution lots of heads rolled and on statues and not just in guillotine. So that said, stoicism has often been used in nefarious ways, but classical philosophy has often been used in nefarious ways. But classical philosophy has often been used in nefarious ways. It's been used by the Nazis. It's been used in other white supremacy communities. So I think that's

something that people have to be honest about and try to counter. And in my own book, this bookstoke was, I work on that, but that's not my main theme. So I do, I will say there is toxic masculinity out there, and the white western, ancient philosophy, classical Roman and Greek philosophy is a place to go if you're looking for that. It's been appropriated and I think it's been misappropriated. That said, Musoni is Rufus himself, who is Epic Titus' teacher, opened his classrooms

to women when someone asked him whether women too should do philosophy. He began to say, yes, they should. They have the same logos, the rational faculty. I'm quoting now from the fragments we have. And they have a desire for ethical excellence and for, you know, a natural orientation to that. What do you say to a your dog is? Yeah. And Plato was our biggest, I mean, Plato's Republic 5, which I teach all the time, is women can be guardians as well. You know, just like cobblers can be bald or not. it doesn't matter, it's not a gender in this case is not a relevant feature from a warrior. So that, so there's that. And I think also the, you know, the idea

epictetus is get in the ring and show your grit and get knocked down and stand up again. get knocked down and stand up again, that misinterpret a whole slew of important stoic stuff. So I, in my, you know, that it's hard to tell the demographics, who's in my classroom, you know, it's lots of undergraduates kind of interested in the stuff, some who have to take it, some who don't have to take it. Men and women alike are looking at this and I think they're trying, you know, some of

them, frankly, find some of the remarks absolutely crazy. I don't think I've ever had an undergraduate class where eyes haven't rolled almost out of their head when, you know, they read Epic Teed is citing an exagurist who says, you know, kiss your child goodbye in the morning as if it's the last time. These poor freshmen have just arrived on campus, and I think they think their mothers and fathers are never going to take them back again, and I sort of have to backpedal a bit and tell them how to think about pre-rehearsal of bads by telling a story I often tell. So this is a daughter thinking about Stoicism talking

to her mother who's 96 and that daughter is me. My mother hated and I tell this story in stoic wisdom. My mother was a woman of few words. Fine was her favorite word. She read four novels a week and my kids and I and my husband would see, visit her and say, what's about? And she says, well, a little bit this and then she said, I say, I'm on how was it? Would you recommend it? It's fine. It's fine. You know, And so we went over how you would write a book report to her daughter, me. So when I came to talk about death, I could see her not wanting to go there.

Are you ready? Do you think, fine. So I would say to her, because I was in charge of all her care and finances, I'd say, you know, mom, I don't think we signed up for the immortality plan. Do you think we did? And she's very beautiful and she would smile at me. And, you know, I get this huge smile. I say, because I'm thinking that if we did, I don't think I can afford it. I don't think you can afford it, mom. And that was our way of pre-rehearsing death of thinking about-

Interesting the elephant and the roof. The mentee, more like, yeah, and we were all going to die. And it actually was helpful for both of us. And in her last few days, she had a very bad coffee, didn't nearly know that the end was so near. But three days before her death, I was visiting her and in her nursing home. And they were wonderful college students who were putting on some performance of group dancing. And my mom was in a wheelchair. And I wheelchair dance. I'm a dancer. I've done modern dance most in a wheelchair. And I wheelchair dance. I'm a dancer. I've done modern dance most of my life.

And I wheelchair danced with her and broad smile. And that was our, we had had this conversation many times about the immortality plan and how expensive it would be. And we saw sort of three days later, I got a call, but a come visit. This will be the last visit. And we sort of, you know, three days later, I got a call, but a come visit, this will be the last visit. And we were ready. So I think we rehearsed it. So those are two women, a mom and a daughter, the daughter, you know, steeped in stoic texts, thinking

about a memento mori, thinking about that will all die and pre-rehearsing it a little bit. And I kind of, we both got ready for it. No, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. I was in lives of the Stokes, I talk about this great passage in one of Robert Carrows' books about Lyndon Johnson, where to go to your point about Marcus as the cowboy, you know, he sort of studying this old west mythology that kind of shapes. And in Johnson, he talks about how, you know, when he, when he goes out and he meets the women of the hill country, and he sees what they went through, he goes like, I never want

to hear a cowboy story again. He's like, he's like, the, the tough one was not the, the person in the gunfight, he said, it was, it was the, the woman bringing water from the well after a perineal tear. The woman ironing clothes that she, when she's heating the iron on a wood stove and a Texas summer when it's 108 outside, there is this element too where it's almost as if the male

stoics are the ones that we hear about, but it's actually these sort of nameless female stoics who, the civil stockdails of generations that were in a way far more still it, because they weren't even getting the glory or the attention for the endless endurance and sacrifice that life demanded of them. Yeah, women's voices have long been suppressed and silenced and many ways diminished. And it's hopefully we're changing that and getting to parity in the workforce and trying to get rid of these crazy myths.

And there's gender fluidity out there in many circles, especially if you're in a university. And there's many different ways in which you can flourish and thrive and fulfill your capacities. If you're a parent and are thinking hard about the flourishing on whether you did a good job raising your kids, you want them to have the opportunities that are not restricted by crazy ways. My mom didn't have the same opportunities for education and for professional life. In many ways, for flourishing, that I've had as a result of my time and place in history. And you know that that that that's sad. And I think it very much motivated me to compensate a little bit and get show her what I what what I could do as a result. So that was that was the last thing I wanted to ask you and I think it's why your work is important

and why I think it's resonated in in the cultures that it has, which is that you know, although you are literally talking about stochism in the classroom a lot of times, you know, I think what's so meaningful to me about stochism is that the whole point of it is to get outside of the classroom. It's to apply it to life's actual problems, whether that's PTSD in the military

or, you know, losing a loved one to old age or a pandemic. To me, stoicism is designed to be an applied philosophy, not an abstract philosophy. And I just curious about that in your... Yeah, stoicism definitely had two phases. So the ancient Greek, Stoics, the founders, Xenocrysipus, Clientis, they definitely were still in the academy. You know, they were in the painted porch, but it was narrow. It was only later under the Romans who were public, you know, Sena Kessin or a rhetorician, a speech writer.

So he's going to open it up, epic Titus. He really did want to catch young boys, 18 to 22 with some shockers and, you know, shock and autactics, and he did a good job. So, I, my own work and certainly in stoic wisdom, stoic warriors has been to listen and hear stories and understand how best to live. I went into teaching moral philosophy because I do think it's about how do you live well? How do you flourish?

How do you thrive? Not solo, but as a community in a shared life, shared voyages and shared journeys and commitments. And the, I have training also in psychoanalysis. So I have psychotherapeutic training. And I guess I, much of my work, also my work with soldiers and after-war and untold war, was to hear their stories. In part because we need to share the burden, I do think it's very, very unfairly distributed military

services. It's not a good system at the moment. And so being able to listen and hear the stories and think about philosophy, if you want to think of it in terms of case studies, that's an old school way of thinking about it, but it is as applying to our daily life. I think that's important. Certainly stoicism is that. Sometimes I think it's misapplied. I don't think it's just a self-help for about me and me and me alone.

It's really about us and us together. And that's the lesson of a kind of, it's being connected at the hip and being at home in the world through our shared humanity. So getting that across in a, you know, the classroom is not always an area-dead place. It's sometimes really, really down on Earth. 18-year-olds can be very down to Earth.

They remind you that we're still teaching, you know, young, impressionable folk. And in general, yes, I'm thinking about philosophy as how do you make the world a better place? How do you bring, how do you, who are privileged to sort of get to read these fun texts? How do you share them with other? I think that's also the task really of science. We're seeing how science has allowed us to get out of this pandemic maybe some of us.

As Marcus says, the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good. And to me, that's a great encapsulation of the obligations of a stoic. Yes, the common humanity, the common humanity that we all embrace is how we should think about the message of stoicism and it kind of went on. Well, Professor, thank you so much. Thank you for your work and it was an honor to talk. Thank you so much Ryan, it's been a privilege being here. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Daily Stoke.

It's mind blowing to me now that we are well over 30 million downloads of this show. It means so much to me to have all of you listen. If you want to help spread the word about the show, please leave a review on iTunes or whatever your favorite podcasting platform is. It helps a lot. And then of course, click subscribe. That's how we know how many people are listening and that makes sure you get the episodes as they come in.

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